Grant Thornton adds executive to expand health informatics

Grant Thornton announced it has added Satish Gattadahalli  as director of its public sector.

Gattadahalli, who is based in the accounting firm’s Alexandria office, will develop and expand Grant Thornton’s health informatics and digital health capabilities.

Gattadahalli has nearly 30 years of strategic IT management experience in government and private-sector health care. Most recently he was a manager and principal strategist for Whitney, Bradley & Brown (WBB) Consulting, where he advised the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), including the agency’s Connected Care Program. Gattadahalli developed, implemented and governed multiple health information technology transformation initiatives for the VHA and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Satish brings to Grant Thornton a deep understanding of the federal healthcare landscape and how to apply IT-based innovation to healthcare,” Carlos Otal, national managing partner of Grant Thornton Public Sector, said in a statement.

Before joining WBB, Gattadahalli was a senior enterprise architect for Electronic Data Systems (EDS), where he also advised the VHA and the Department of Veterans Affairs. While at EDS, Gattadahalli helped create industry standards for health informatics and made significant contributions to the development of the Federal Health Architecture, an initiative to increase health IT collaboration among government agencies.

Gattadahalli helped establish Health Level-7, or HL7, a set of international standards for transfer of clinical and administrative data between software applications used by health-care providers. He has authored numerous white papers on topics such as mobile health IT practices, health systems engineering, telehealth and patient-generated data, and has been published in peer-reviewed health information journals, including the Journal of American Health Information Management Association.

Gattadahalli received a master’s degree in computer systems management from the University of Maryland University College and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Bangalore University.